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0 pointsEGreg7mo ago0 comments

1. I actually disagree. I think teasers should be free but websites should charge micropayments for their content. Here is how it can be done seamlessly, without individuals making decisions to pay every minute: https://qbix.com/ecosystem

2. This also intersects with copyright law. Ingesting content to your servers en masse through automation and transforming it there is not the same as giving people a tool (like Safari Reader) they can run on their client for specific sites they visit. Examples of companies that lost court cases about this:

  Aereo, Inc. v. American Broadcasting Companies (2014)
  TVEyes, Inc. v. Fox News Network, LLC (2018)
  UMG Recordings, Inc. v. MP3.com, Inc. (2000)
  Capitol Records, LLC v. ReDigi Inc. (2018)
  Cartoon Network v. CSC Holdings (Cablevision) (2008)
  Image Search Engines: Perfect 10 v. Google (2007)

That last one is very instructive. Caching thumbnails and previews may be OK. The rest is not. AMP is in a copyright grey area, because publishers choose to make their content available for AMP companies to redisplay. (@tptacek may have more on this)

3. Putting copyright law aside, that's the point. Decentralization vs Centralization. If a bunch of people want to come eat at an all-you-can-eat buffet, they can, because we know they have limited appetites. If you bring a giant truck and load up all the food from all all-you-can-eat buffets in the city, that's not OK, even if you later give the food away to homeless people for free. You're going to bankrupt the restaurants! https://xkcd.com/1499/

So no. The difference is that people have come to expect "free" for everything, and this is how we got into ad-supported platforms that dominate our lives.

0 comments

glenstein7mo ago

I would love micropayments as a kind of baked-in ecosystem support. You can crawl if you want, but it's pay to play. Which hopefully drives motivation for robust norms for content access and content scraping that makes everyone happy.

EGregOP7mo ago

I want to bring Ted Nelson on my channel and interview him about Xanadu. Does anyone here know him?

https://xanadu.com.au/ted/XU/XuPageKeio.html

jacurtis7mo ago

I think this is the world we are going to. I'm not going to get mired in the details of how it would happen, but I see this end result as inevitable (and we are already moving that way).

I expect a lot more paywalls for valuable content. General information is commoditized and offered in aggregated form through models. But when an AI is fetching information for you from a website, the publisher is still paying the cost of producing that content and hosting that content. The AI models are increasing the cost of hosting the content and then they are also removing the value of producing the content since you are just essentially offering value to the AI model. The user never sees your site.

I know Ads are unpopular here, but the truth is that is how publishers were compensated for your attention. When an AI model views the information that a publisher produces, then modifies it from its published form, and removes all ad content. Then you now have increased costs for producers, reduced compensation in producing content (since they are not getting ad traffic), and the content isn't even delivered in the original form.

The end result is that publishers now have to paywall their content.

Maybe an interesting middle-ground is if the AI Model companies compensated for content that they access similar to how Spotify compensates for plays of music. So if an AI model uses information from your site, they pay that publisher a fraction of a cent. People pay the AI models, and the AI models distribute that to the producers of content that feed and add value to the models.

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